Robert Mark Kamen established his roots in Hollywood. But his heart is in the hills of Sonoma, where he tends to his vineyard.

Robert Mark Kamen takes a stroll in his vineyard. His friends warned him that its rocky soil would be difficult to work. Chronicle photo by Brant Ward

Robert Mark Kamen takes a stroll in his vineyard. His friends warned him that its rocky soil would be difficult to work. Chronicle photo by Brant Ward

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Robert Mark Kamen takes a stroll in his vineyard. His friends warned him that its rocky soil would be difficult to work. Chronicle photo by Brant Ward

Robert Mark Kamen takes a stroll in his vineyard. His friends warned him that its rocky soil would be difficult to work. Chronicle photo by Brant Ward

Robert Mark Kamen established his roots in Hollywood. But his heart is in the hills of Sonoma, where he tends to his vineyard.

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2004-03-11 04:00:00 PDT Sonoma -- First of two parts

FADE IN

EXTERIOR. AN UNDEVELOPED HILL IN SONOMA COUNTY -- DAY

(It's 1979 and the camera looks down on two long-haired young men walking up a narrow overgrown path. The HIKING BUDDY, whose face is never shown, forges ahead, carrying a small backpack with the necks of two wine bottles sticking out the top. ROBERT, dressed in ratty denim shorts and a tunic that looks like it was purchased in a failing Third World country, grumbles as he straggles about 10 yards behind.)

ROBERT

"Can't we smoke the joints now? Can't we drink the wine now?"

HIKING BUDDY

"We're almost there."

ROBERT

"Why do we have to do this, I mean aren't we supposed to be ..."

HIKING BUDDY

" Turn around."

ROBERT

"...celebrating my wonderfulness ... ."

(The camera focuses on ROBERT's reaction, but not what he sees. As he turns to take in the view, a holy light hits his face -- think Quentin Tarantino's briefcase in "Pulp Fiction" -- and his gaze quickly turns from insolent to awestruck.).

As the veteran Hollywood writer tells it, the six-figure payment for his first screenplay had been in his possession only a few days when he decided to spend every cent on this raw chunk of land in Sonoma Valley.

It was an astronomical sum for a kid who grew up in a New York housing project, and it was gone before he could open a bank account.

"I was told all I have to do is take my check and pass it over. I didn't have a second thought," Kamen says, recalling the fated hike 25 years ago (the above script was written by The Chronicle based on his recollections). "The place didn't even have an easement when I bought it. It had no water. It had no electricity. It had no road. But I felt so strongly about it. I responded so viscerally to it. I wanted it in my life, and I got it."

Fortunately for Kamen, the screenplay "Crossings," which never got made, wasn't his last contact with Hollywood. He followed it by co-writing the 1981 military school drama "Taps," which helped introduce the world to Sean Penn and Tom Cruise. Three years later, Kamen penned his most enduring hit, "The Karate Kid," a moviemaking phenomenon in 1984 that made a ton of money and soaked in critical acclaim -- despite starring bit actors from "Eight is Enough" and "Happy Days."

While Kamen's reputation as a hitmaker was cemented among the biggest studios in Los Angeles, few were aware that a large portion of the proceeds from success were funding his money pit of a vineyard project in the Bay Area. To this day, only a handful of the screenwriter's closest friends have stepped foot on the grounds of Kamen Estate Wines.

But Kamen says the 280-acre property defines him more than any of his movies ever will.

"I was sitting up here smoking a joint and drinking wine. The only thing I could think of was 'I've got to possess this,' " Kamen says. "I didn't have a scheme for any of this. I was just kind of going along. And everything just sort of evolved. Some people have great plans. I'm not one of those people. The only thing I knew was I had to have this piece of property in my life. "

Since the 1970s, Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties have been a Bermuda Triangle for some of Hollywood's most intense artists.

They reluctantly fly south to sign the papers, record the albums and act the parts, but something always brings them back home. Whether they're making wine (Francis Ford Coppola) or raising a brood (Sean Penn, Tom Waits), the North Bay is the ultimate refuge. Good weather for most of the year. Some of the best food in the world. No Star Maps.

Kamen is 56, but looks at least a decade younger, crediting Tai Chi and his wife Lorna for maintaining his youth.

Kamen wears the Hollywood artiste uniform (black T-shirt, longish curly brown hair, earring) and will give long answers when asked about his writing, but avoids the moviemaking-is-magic company line.

The writer spends most of his time in New York, but blends in comfortably when he's around wine country natives. His most distinguishing feature is his friendly-yet-scattered energy, which brings to mind a beagle or Jack Russell terrier.

Driving a meandering five-mile road from Sonoma's historic town square to his land in the Valley of the Moon winemaking region, Kamen points out his neighbors with the rehearsed enthusiasm of a Disneyland Jungle Cruise tour guide. That's Danny Glover's vineyard to the right. Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett's getaway is on the left.

"Sometimes he plays, and you can hear it all over the valley," Kamen says.

The road dead ends at Kamen's property line, which is marked only by a hastily painted address on a chunk of wood.

Kamen's land is stunning, but it isn't particularly inviting. A passive- aggressive dirt-and-gravel pathway (pilots of two-wheel-drive Saturns enter at your own risk) curves up the suddenly prehistoric terrain, which includes glossy black volcanic outcroppings, monster oak trees and enough scattered boulders to build another Great Wall. There are, in fact, many smaller but equally impressive little walls, which appear to have no mortar but still rise at sharp angles with no sign of crumbling. In many places, the two-foot-high barriers are the only evidence that a human hand has touched Kamen's property.

Kamen's winemaker calls the ground "tenacious," which is a nice way of saying "growing things on it is a bitch." As picturesque as the steep hillside scenery is -- Kamen has a pond with a rowboat -- the property is a nightmare for farming.

"Look at this slope. Look at the rocks. Do you know how hard it is to get a piece of machinery up and down that without killing yourself?" Kamen says, pointing at a hill that nearly qualifies as a cliff. "If you try to bring a tractor down the hill, you lose all your traction and by the time you get over here, you're f -- . You're knocking over all your vines."

He went ahead and built a vineyard anyway.

Kamen sold "Crossings" to Warner Bros. for $135,000 -- a sizable down payment for the property, which a couple of feuding dentists were willing to unload in 1979 for just over $300,000.

Kamen, Lorna and three daughters born in the 1980s continued to live in New York, flying to Sonoma only for short visits. But the scriptwriter's commitment to the property was serious. Informed after purchase that the land had the potential to yield great wine, Kamen assembled the right team to cultivate it -- starting with Phil Coturri, a respected member of a well- known local farming family.

It was the first of many cinematic moves for Kamen, whose employees all seem to come from central casting. While Kamen in 2004 looks the part of a screenwriter, Coturri is an almost-too-perfect stereotype for organic farming.

A philosophy major in college, his wine schooling came directly from the vineyards, where his father had him working at age 14. In serious need of a translator (as well as a haircut -- a bearded Jack Black can play him in the movie), Coturri's answers are usually short and have a tendency to trail off into mumbling. But he's a poet at heart, and his speech seems to become clearer when there's something important to say.

The property's 46-acres vineyard is a postage stamp compared to some 1, 000-acre competitors near Sonoma and Napa Valley, but Kamen's start-up costs were immense anyway.

"If you want to dig a hole in the Alexander Valley, you just take a shovel and scoop it up and you have 10 in a minute," Coturri explains, during a recent wine-tasting at the vineyard. "Here you have to spend 10 minutes for one hole. Or 20 minutes for one. Everything you do on this property, it's at least 10 times harder."

Kamen recognizes the futility of his choices. ("The wine business is a f - - stupid business," he blurts out in the middle of a recent interview. "You don't make any money and you're at the mercy of the weather.") But he seems unable to stop himself from pouring money into the property.

With thousands of holes that needed digging, Kamen quickly bankrolled an entourage. Coturri and a family of Mexico-born farmers finished the vineyard in 1984 and started harvesting the grapes, which were sold to other wineries in the area for little or no profit.

Luckily for everyone's continued employment, Kamen's screenwriting became much more lucrative than his career as a vineyard owner.

In the beginning most of the movies were personal. The unfilmed "Crossings," about a group of college students who go to Afghanistan on a hash run and become touched by the nobility of the locals, was inspired by Kamen's own experiences exploring the country. "Taps," an adaptation from Devery Freeman's book, contains many of Kamen's feelings of loneliness and alienation when he was a teen.

Kamen's original screenplay for "The Karate Kid" was even more introspective. The memorable Mr. Miyagi character, which earned Pat Morita an Oscar nomination, was based on Meitoku Yagi, a martial arts inspiration for Kamen. Meitoku was a disciple of Miyagi Chogun, the Okinawan father of Goju- ryu -- which is the basis for the training of bullied "Karate Kid" protagonist Daniel LaRusso.

"The Karate Kid" is a good display of Kamen's way with dialogue. It contains believable conversations between kids and adults, often using humor to make a ridiculous scene or plot point more human.

"How did you do that? How did you do that?!" Daniel Larusso exclaims in "The Karate Kid," after Miyagi karate chops the heads off three beer bottles left by tough guys who are hassling the pair.

"Don't know," Miyagi responds. "First time."

Disney knew it had a quality movie, but the studio wasn't sure how to market it. By 1984, lead actor Ralph Macchio had appeared in Coppola's "The Outsiders," TV's "Eight is Enough," a Bubble Yum commercial and little else. Morita was best known for the supporting part of Arnold, the malt-shop owner in "Happy Days." Desperate for buzz they sneak screened the movie in big cities, a move that was unprecedented at the time.

"They put nothing into the advertising of the movie," Kamen says. "They advertised the first two weeks and then it just carried itself by word of the mouth."

After the modestly budgeted movie grossed nearly $100 million, the studios wanted more of the same from the writer. And while the paychecks kept getting bigger, Kamen's deeply personal stories took a back seat to the fighting-themed movies that he was becoming known for.

Kamen penned two "Karate Kid" sequels and the third "Lethal Weapon" movie. But the writer's most lucrative move came in the early 1990s.

"It was all going pretty good, and then my agent got me this job with Warner Bros. to be their script assassin," Kamen recalls. "I started re- writing all their stuff that went into production."

For large sums of money (seven figures for a few months work isn't unusual) script doctors drop in at the 11th hour -- often after a movie has started filming -- and make last-minute repairs to some of the studio's biggest investments. Kamen worked on Warner Bros. hits including "Under Siege" and "The Fugitive," sometimes making radical changes without getting his name on the finished product.

Kamen's most personal movie during his years with Warner Bros. was the 1995 romance "A Walk in the Clouds," which explored the relationship between a World War II veteran played by Keanu Reeves and an Old World winemaking family in the Napa Valley.

As Kamen worked on the script for the movie, based loosely on a 1942 Italian screenplay, he turned for the first time to his own vineyard for inspiration.

"I needed that one scene," Kamen says, during a recent stroll through the northwest end of his vineyard. "This was the block I was walking through. At that time the vines were 12 years old. They were just beautiful big thick gorgeous vines. I'm walking through and I'm saying: What's the most horrible thing that could happen? I know. It can burn down."

When Kamen ran the idea by Coturri, the lifelong wine country resident was skeptical and blunt. The conversation, as both sides recall, went like this:

PHIL: "Vineyards don't really burn, Robert.""

ROBERT: "And 8-foot-tall furry creatures don't really fly spaceships. Do you want to talk to George Lucas about that?""

As "A Walk in the Clouds" was about to be released, Kamen was finalizing plans to expand his living space at the vineyard from a tiny studio to a 3,500- foot house. As is his habit, Kamen found a way to spend way more money than necessary, importing wood beams from an 150-year-old barn that was falling apart in Tuscany.

"A Walk in the Clouds" opened in August 1995 to so-so reviews and solid box office numbers. Later that year, construction materials started to pile up at Kamen Estate Wines, and the weekend getaway was ready to become a home.

EXTERIOR. A THRIVING SONOMA COUNTY VINEYARD -- DAY

(It's 1996 and a huge bear of a man in a Grateful Dead T-shirt is on the top of a hill, talking into a bulky Motorola cell phone. The hill is mostly dirt, with a small crow's nest of a studio apartment next to stacked lumber and other building materials. As the camera rises above PHIL, the valley below comes into view. A hill a few hundreds yards away is charred black and smoking, while flames creep across ROBERT's vineyard.)

PHIL

"Robert, it's burning. There's nothing we can do."

ROBERT (voice from other end of cell phone)

"Oh f -- ."

PHIL

"I'm sorry, but they're making me go. I've got to go."

ROBERT

"F -- . F -- . F -- ."

PHIL

"I'll call you as soon as I can. I've got to go."

Kamen and Coturri recognize that others will see irony in the situation, and have a ready supply of one-liners when the subject of the July 31, 1996, fire that destroyed most of Kamen Estate Wines comes up.

"From now on, I read the end of all his movies," is Coturri's best quip about the blaze, which started when a PG&E line fell on a group of trees and destroyed parts of five vineyards near Sonoma.

But spend a little time with both men, and it's clear that the jokes are a defense mechanism. Kamen's tone becomes somber when he is standing next to a line of freshly planted grapevines, pointing in the direction where the flames came over the hill.

"The vines didn't burn. This stuff burned," Kamen says, tapping on the line of tubing that runs down each row of plants. "The rubber caught fire, and cut across the vine this way and killed the system that brings the nutrients up into the vines. The nutrients couldn't go up the top of the vine, and they just died. But they died a horrible slow death like slow cancer. Poetic justice."

Kamen recalls that he had just eaten at the Mesa Grille in New York, doing tequila shooters with Lorna, when Phil called with the devastating news.

"My wife and I were just kind of rolling around in bed, being drunk and giddy and stupid. And the phone rings and he said 'Your vineyard is burning,'" Kamen says. "I couldn't sleep. My heart was pounding. Phil kept telling me 'I've got to go.' Somebody was going to arrest him if he didn't leave."

With that said, Kamen changes the subject. Later, Coturri fills in the blanks.

"He'd say, "Oh, f -- ." Then he'd hang up and call 15 minutes later and then again 15 minutes after that," Coturri recalls. "I'd tell him 'Robert, it's burning, there's nothing we can do.' What do you say to a disaster victim?"

There would be better days to come at Kamen Estate Wines, but Coturri said it was hard to imagine things would ever be the same again.

"To this day, when a fire occurs, even if it's a little blurb on television, I still get the same feeling," Coturri said. "Total helplessness."

In tomorrow's concluding part, learn how Robert Kamen says working with Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford is great, but he's always glad to come back to Sonoma.